Oh god, that's so awful.

What is so tragic about the fertilizer factory is that 11 of the 12 dead were volunteer first-responders. The plant caught fire, they went to put it out, and then it blew up and killed them. So awful.

Wow, I didn't know that. That's horrible.

1/3 of the town's volunteer fire department are among the dead.

Ugh.

Training house-burning is a lot of fun. A friend was with the volunteer fire department, which is a big thing in NC. I don't know about the rest of the country. City departments didn't respond beyond the city limits, so groups of people would volunteer, raise funds, buy trucks and equipment, do proper research and training with pro units, and set up volunteer stations within communities.

Anyway, they had a house donated, with no time limit for clearing the site, so they lit it up and practiced going through rooms looking for kids hiding, pets, putting out specific kinds of fires in various locations (attic, kitchen, upholstered furniture, insulation, electrical wiring), and putting it out without terminal damage so they could light it up and use it again: ladder access to second floor windows, chopping holes in the roof to guide a burn, all kinds of stuff.

We were invited to the house's final burn and funeral pyre. In spite of the very professional way the squad progressed through the evening, there was a "Yay! Burn!" atmosphere on site that night.

Nobody thought to bring hot dogs and marshmallows, though.

ET apologize for the awkward crosspost about volunteer responders.

I was just reading about the SS Grandcamp explosion, and that killed all but one of the volunteer firefighters.

Bless people who do that for a living, and bless those who volunteer.

In massively trite news, I was back on the Harvard site looking at tests, and this one is supposed to predict your age: [link] I'm going to take that as a compliment.

Today is just from bizarroland. Good chance I won't be able to swim due to storms. We're now under a tornado watch.

I saw a Texas editorial that blamed the disaster, in part, on lax LOCAL zoning. Like not letting an explosive fertilizer plant be situated near homes and schools, common sense stuff.

(Depending on a volunteer FD to handle an industrial fire is ASKING for a disaster. )

The first comment on the piece accused the writer of being a liberal in love with big government and, I swear "the Obamassiah."

Note once again: the writer was calling for local zoning.

That's very sad about the Texas fire.

The test said I'm 42, and then asked what my real age and it was surprisingly hard for me to figure that out. I'm all "I am 42! No, wait, 45. What year is it?" Took me over a minute, I think.

oh msbelle, how awful! I don't know how, as a town, you get over something like that.

I keep thinking about those two brothers and trying to understand how you can live somewhere for 10 years, have good friends there, and yet want to blow it up. It doesn't make sense. The only way I can make sense of it is to imagine that planning to do something so deadly and so secret must give someone a heady sense of their own importance. I can only understand it as ego-driven, ego propped up by ideology.

In massively trite news, I was back on the Harvard site looking at tests, and this one is supposed to predict your age: [link]. I'm going to take that as a compliment.

I took the test last night using the touchpad of my netbook and my lefthand. It estimated my age at 50. Today using my wrong hand on a mouse, it estimated my age at 31.

My father's old upholstery shop was donated for a training burn. Old wooden structure that had decades of lint in it, on top of having been a garage and gas station for decades before then. The fire department was all giddy about it, especially as one of the firemen was my BIL, so he knew all about the conditions of the place. They said beforehand that they knew it would go fast, so they were practicing keeping it from being a fireball and catching the rest of the area on fire. But looking at the pictures hurt.